Zaida Ben-Yúsuf

Zaida Ben-Yúsuf, born in London, 1869, the first-born daughter to German and Algerian parents, was a New York based portrait photographer. Zaida’s mother would emigrate to the United States of America in 1891, with Zaida herself following in 1895, joining her mother as a milliner, but would soon begin to work in photography.

Little is known of how Zaida learned and began taking photographs, yet she would embark first into the art world, exhibiting in 1896 for a show sponsored by the Linked Ring photographic society – a society setup to propose and defend photography as an art and science. The following year she would open her portrait studio at 124 Fifth Avenue in New York and throughout published her work in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Camera Notes.

Working across art, fashion, and theatre photography, Zaida’s work takes on an aesthetic, striking appearance. Through her self-portraiture: looking directly at camera, distinctly posed, her left arm resting on the table besides – supporting her head – as her skirt sweeps our eyes up towards her gaze. Or her famed The Odor of Pomegranates, melding into the fine drapery setting, the woman holds the pomegranate up towards her eyes, her skin iridescent against the darkness enshrouding the image, exuding a mysterious elegance and ethereal quality to the photograph.

“The keynote of interest in modern photography is the possibility of expressing one’s personal point of view.”
– Zaida Ben-Yúsuf, The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture, 1901.

In 1905, Zadia would depart on a 35,000 miles globetrotting venture, partaking in magazine writing, teaching, and illustrating, to supplement her income while visiting Japan. Zaida would return to New York City in 1908, and for several years travel between New York, London, and Paris. In 1911, she was elected to the feminist Lyceum Club and in 1914 she became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. From the 1920s and until her death, at 64, in 1933, Zaida returned to the fashion world; creating and promoting women’s fashion in New York.

As one of America’s foremost photographers, receiving acclaim early on in her career, Zaida’s work plays a central component of modernism in art and photography’s consideration as an art form unto itself. Her career in photography and fashion, show how both could be used as a way for women in the 19th and early 20th century to make an independent living, at a time when careers for women were limited.

Zadia’s work is held by the United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; and The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Chicago.

By Emery

Zaida Ben-Yúsuf, photographer. (ca. 1900) The odor of pomegranates / Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/98501302